12/30/2008

I'm sitting here watching my environment rebuild. It's been doing so for about 40 minutes now, and will probably go on for another 20 at least. It's one of the small joys of software development. You sometimes get a build process so tiresomely long that you can declare an impromptu break from doing any actual work because you've got a build going on.

I try to get my builds done early in the day, so that there aren't a bunch of other devs around who would see my brief respite from the code-grindstone as an opportunity to get me to do their work for them. It's hard enough as it is. Just yesterday, I was interrupted while working out a rather complicated bit of logical acrobatics in code to retrofit some horrendously bad, and completely undocumented, code written by someone who was, and I quote, "fired, because he was an idiot." [Why my previous company didn't have the balls to do this to some of my worst co-workers, I'll never understand.] Right when I was parsing out the worst of it in my head, one of my coworkers strolled over to ask me where he could find the SQL repository for some piece of code. He could tell me what page on the website he was working with, but couldn't tell me what EJB, or DAO, or even what domain objects were involved in the process (ignore the three-letter acronyms there [TLAs], the key point is that those are things you need to know). Apparently, he felt it would be easier to ask me where these things were, rather than attempt to parse them out himself. Or maybe he had tried, and failed to find what he was looking for, which, frankly, puts him in danger of being fired, by the standards previously noted. Either way, it was a case of him wanting me to do his work for him. So, I had to stop my intense logical considerations and address his issue, which was me basically saying, you need to find the DAO, which seemed to come as a revelation (pink slip time).

I've been deep in the DAO dirt for so long now that I've forgotten most of what the other layers in the application do. But to get there, I had to leverage the debugging utilities, and even when I got there, the code was so . . . needlessly convoluted and poorly written . . . no . . . the term I'm looking for here is "shit fuckingly grotesque" . . . that it took me the better part of a day to even comprehend what the "idiot" who wrote it was even trying to do, much less unwind the spaghetti of his nasally expelled mental vomit in order to replace his sad excuse for code with something that, if not elegant, was at least documented so that the next person to come along would understand not only what I was trying to do, but how I was trying to do it, and, most importantly, why I had to put a simple bandage on what was essentially a massive suppurating head wound. And, to totally jerk my metaphors around here, when you're doing microsurgery of that magnitude, you don't want the fucking janitor busting in without a mask on to ask where he can empty the trash in another room.

12/29/2008

Well, Lotus is finally starting to "get" Christmas. Tesla, less so. And, of course, 3White is just 5 months old now, so what does he know? Nothing about nothing.

We had a fun day. The kids got all sorts of toys, which, of course, instantly turned in to points of contention between the 2 girls. Lotus is also starting to enjoy video games. Well, at least, she enjoys watching Daddy play her video game. Turns out Littlest Pet Shop requires a bunch of reading, and since she's really just getting started in that area, it's probably a little much. Especially some of the longer terms, like "Control Pad".

Over the weekend, Lotus learned the true power of video game addiction: your parents will use it to control you.

I'm starting a month-long series of working Sundays. Partly because my vacation time wasn't considered billable to the client, and thus the client is willing to pay those hours to me, and partly because even the best guy on critical path (me) needs a little leeway to get some things done. Especially considering the utter nightmare that is the code base we have at this time. So . . . another month or so of short-but-sweet posts awaits.

12/24/2008

While I can sort of let the Government slide on sponsoring a NASCAR team (after all, they have an advertising budget, just like the US Post Office - though the USPS had to stop sponsoring Lance Armstrong for some reason), I really can't abide the fact that so very many of the recipients of our taxpayer dollars, in the form of the recent bailouts, are clearly spending that money on corporate sponsorships.

Most of those aren't new sponsorships, but some deals were entered in to while they collected a fat paycheck out of my wallet. The Citigroup sponsorship of the new home of the NY Mets is brand new, though they've been sponsoring the Rose Bowl since 2003.

AIG sponsors Manchester United. Congrats, US Taxpayer, you now (basically) own a UK football club.

12/23/2008

Showers are awesome. Yesterday, I was wrestling with a coding issue and just couldn't come up with an elegant yet quick solution. This morning, as I showered, all that parallel processing that goes on in dream land came up with the answer as I was scrubbing the sleep out of my hair.

Mostly, it was a good weekend. The one sour note was that our babysitter called in sick on Saturday night, which left us high and dry for the holiday party Ladybug and I were supposed to go to. Very sad. It was something we had been looking forward to since mid-November. A night out without the kids and with our friends. Sadly, it was not to be.

But, we're salvaging that to go to an exhibit of Chihuly at the Desert Botanical Gardens on Boxing Day. That should be awesome. We just watched the Chihuly at Kew Gardens documentary on PBS, so it'll be nice to see that in person.

12/18/2008

It'll be short, because I've gotten insanely busy since I got back to work this week.

I'm still pissed about the bailout, and Citigroup's recent rate-jacking of many customers isn't helping. Why did we give them $20 billion again? So they could screw their card holders to get another ivory backscratcher? I guess so.

Chrysler is closing it's factories for a month to save operating costs. Good! While I love Chrysler's cars (I have two now - Caravan and Magnum), business is business. I love Studebakers too, and it's not like they're still in business.

The kids are getting excited about Christmas next week. We did the tree and decorated the house in a record 1 hour and 45 minutes this year. It was rather incredible. I managed to not fall off the ladder this time, as well, which helped.

That's it for now. If you're strapped for something long and involved to read, check out my Zombie Survival Shopping List. It now has the most comments of any post I've made here yet.

12/16/2008

So, I've just become eligible for health insurance through my new employer. For the last 3 months, I've been enjoying COBRA, which is absurdly expensive. Though, not as expensive as not having insurance and needing it.

We went over the new plan, and it was looking like we would be paying almost as much as we did for COBRA on the new plan. What? Wait . . . oh . . . no . . . that's not right. Apparently there's something wrong with the system and it told me the wrong number.

But for a while there, it was looking ugly. So we toyed with getting private health insurance. Talk about a nightmare. The plans are completely incomprehensible, the fees are either outrageous or come with convoluted terms that probably mean the out-of-pocket is still outrageous for a year. It's just not pleasant. At all.

So, I'm counting myself lucky that I can afford the insurance from my employer.

But I'd much rather have been able to choose from some real, clear, affordable choices.

12/15/2008

Well, I'm sitting here, waiting for my diePod to finish it's restore process and then get on with syncing my podcasts before I head out to work. It's more than a little annoying that I have no idea why it's decided it needed a complete restore this morning, but at least it's keeping me from getting to work too early.

A week off changes one's perspective.

Anyway, we had an excellent time in Disneyland, though we had a much better one in Legoland. Lotus and Tesla rode practically every ride in the park, in most cases many times over. I think Lotus rode the Beetle Bounce (think free-fall ride on a very small scale) about 50 times. Benefits of being one of maybe 50 children in the entire park. I kid you not. Legoland was, for all intents and purposes, ours to command. Since we were staying at the MarBrisa resort, we even had our own entrance to the park. Sure, some of the other guests came in via that method, but none of them stayed in the playground that the entrance dumps you in to. Lotus and Tesla ran around the play area without so much as seeing another child for at least 45 minutes.

I was thrilled that Lotus decided to ride some of the rides. She was pretty much against riding anything in Disneyland, sadly. Tesla wanted to ride everything. Maybe in a couple years, when she's tall enough. The person at the swings in California Adventure was so moved by Tesla's desire to ride the swings that she gave her a card, good for a jump to the front of the line when she's finally tall enough to ride. Lotus almost went on, but saw the ride in action first, and decided at the last minute that it was too high and too fast. Oh well. Maybe next time.

Sea World was also a blast, as the kids are finally getting in to some of the shows they have at the park. Lotus also particularly remembers seeing the penguins, even though (or perhaps because) she was afraid of the dark and wanted to leave from perhaps the first minute we were in there.

As for me, I got to ride pretty much everything I wanted to ride. All three parks were fairly deserted, so we could ride anything we wanted as many times as we could handle it. Or at least as many times as the person who had to stay with the kids could handle it. Which ended up being about 2 times each.

We even made pretty good time driving there and back again. About 7 hours each way, including all stops and so on.